INVISIBLE ADVERSITY

Snow Anderson. Special to the TribuneCHICAGO TRIBUNE

On the morning of the day that would forever change Dennis Newman's life, he went for his usual 3-mile run. Then, before leaving his Northbrook home, he signed an insurance policy. It was a disability policy.

"I had the choice of signing up for a lifetime policy paying $4,000 a month, for a very small premium," he recalled, "or a 15-month policy [that paid] $1,500 a month." Being in excellent health, Newman signed the 15-month policy, got ready to drive to an appointment to check out a small business he was considering buying and mailed the premium.

Before the day was over, he would be paralyzed on the left side of his body, the result of an internal head injury.

In a similar twist of irony, award-winning WMAQ-Ch. 5 television news photographer Suzanne Richter was shooting a story about train safety, when an accident involving a train left her without the use of her right arm.

It took only seconds for Newman and Richter to incur injuries and physical disabilities that will last a lifetime. But to the casual observer, the two appear to be perfectly healthy; they don't have the wheelchairs or crutches that would signal their disabilities to the rest of the world. Yet it's these hidden disabilities, they will tell you, that can seem as devastating as the visible ones.

"It's almost better if someone is in a wheelchair," said Deborah Giesler, a speech pathologist who works extensively with people who have suffered head injuries. She is director of the Midwest Brain Injury Clubhouse in Park Ridge. "That way people can see their disability, they can say, 'Let me hold the door for you.' But for some of these people, their appearance really doesn't show what they go through."

Giesler cited a friend who suffered injuries so severe that she actually died and was revived several times on the way to the hospital. "Her injuries are not external, so often, when she parks in a handicapped space, people give her dirty looks because they can't see anything wrong with her. But she has very poor endurance, her lungs are damaged, so she runs out of breath very quickly, but people don't see that. The weather especially affects her."

It's harder for high-functioning people, which Newman and Richter were before their accidents, to find themselves in handicapped situations because they can't meet their own expectations, Giesler said. "But their recovery is going to be better. They're going to work twice as hard, because they are so determined to meet their challenges."

Richter remembers very little of the events that altered her life on Feb. 22, 1999. She was at a train crossing on the Far West Side of the city, at Narragansett Avenue just north of North Avenue. She vaguely recalls setting up her equipment. She does not remember the approaching Metra train. Her first memory, she said, is being in the hospital.

Her right arm was immobilized, wrapped all the way up to the shoulder. She had a gash on top of her skull. A photograph of her in the hospital shows her with black "raccoon eyes." It's what happens when you hit the back of your head and the blood rushes to your face, Richter explained.

All in all, she thought, she was in "pretty good shape." But she also was on a morphine pump. It never occurred to Richter to wonder if her arm was all right. She just assumed it was.

The day she realized her arm was not all right was "just about one of the worst days I had in my life." Doctors at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago were conducting a nerve-response test, and after about 10 minutes, Richter said, she could tell it wasn't going well. After about 40 minutes, "I knew if I wasn't getting any response, my arm was never going to work again. It was absolutely devastating. I had never imagined it would turn out this way. I was so unprepared for it."

Richter underwent surgery to replace the damaged nerves in her arm. She also underwent physical therapy and pain management, and she continues to see a therapist weekly.

She works four days a week at NBC, editing videotape with her left arm, her right arm either in a sling or resting in her lap. She is considering more surgery to fuse her right shoulder. It would involve taking bone from her hip.

The hardest part of all this, she said, is that people don't understand how difficult her life is.

"They don't see. They see me as this person, I seemingly look like everybody else walking around, except I have what looks like a broken arm and here, I have all these obstacles."

The pain is the worst, she said, describing the phantom limb pain that continues two years later in her wrist and hand. "The body perceives they were amputated, so when I move my arm," she said, flexing her elbow, which she is able to do because of the nerve-replacement surgery, "it kind of stays there right in front of me, in the air."

The pain sometimes comes in a burst and lasts only about three seconds. Other times it's longer, perhaps 15 seconds, but less intense. "It feels like my hand and wrist are in a vise grip," she said.

"The pain is an obstacle to a productive life," Richter added. "And you also feel no one believes it, because they can't see it."

Simple becomes complex

But she also doesn't like to complain. "People are suffering a hell of a lot more than me, I realize that. I'm not in a wheelchair. I have my left arm. It's just an arm. I can get by perfectly well, but it's frustrating. Each day is difficult. Getting on the bus is difficult, especially when it's cold. It's hard to carry anything when you don't have an extra arm to get it."

She used to be able to get ready in 20 minutes; now, Richter said, it takes her an hour. She doesn't cook anymore and can't do her own laundry. The simplest tasks in life become monumental.

"Making my bed is really hard. I used to do a lot of sewing and mending things. I can't do that at all," Richter said.

Shortly after the accident, Richter said, she received a letter from a man in Los Angeles who had lost part of his leg. "He said, `The hardest thing about what has happened to you is that you're going to have to accept that you are different person now.'

"I have been fighting that," she said. "I don't want to be a different person. I want to be the person I was before. It's not that it's worse. It's just different. I miss that other person. It's the holding on that's the hardest thing."

"I don't know if you ever accept what happens," Newman said. "I had a whole list of things I wanted to do in life before I died. And before the accident, I had managed to complete about two-thirds of it."

The remainder, he knows, will remain unfinished, describing what happened to him as "shattered dreams."A small-business owner who was involved in the record business until 1987 (he owned Rolling Stone Records, now Rock Records on 175 W. Washington St.), Newman was a vital, energetic man, when his car was struck at an intersection on a highway near Antioch on Sept. 12, 1989.

Like Richter, he remembers very little of the accident and the ensuing days at the hospital. Physically, he suffered only minor bruising, but the internal buildup of fluid in his head put pressure on his brain, causing paralysis on the left side of his body.

Surgery the morning after the accident relieved the pressure, but the damage was done. He not only experienced physical paralysis but also neurological damage.

"It was a loss of the man I married," said his wife, Maria Newman. "It's a hidden loss. The person is still there, but he's not the same person."

"The hardest thing is that I can't function," Newman said. "I have the cognitive skills but not the physical. I can tell my son how to play basketball, but I can't show him. I can tell him how to swing [a bat], but I can't do it."

Newman's son, Alex, has only known his father as disabled--the boy was 13 months old when the accident happened.

Everything is different now

Through rehabilitation and physical therapy, Newman has been able to walk but not well. He can lose his balance easily, and seven years ago, after slipping on a patch of ice, he broke his hip and had to have hip-replacement surgery.

His left arm is completely non-functioning, his right shoulder is "frayed," he said, from the extra stress placed on it. He goes swimming religiously and stretches every morning.

For him these activities are not an option but a necessity.

Everything is different now, he said, from getting dressed to preparing food. Everything requires extra time, effort and thought.

Twelve years after the accident, Newman describes his life as filled with anxiety, anguish and frustration.

He is always in a high state of alert when he ventures outside the house. And it has gotten worse, he said.

"When I was healthy, I was with the world and the flow. But the world has speeded up and I'm moving at half-speed. The world is going at double speed. In the early '90s, I could try to keep up; now even going to Walgreen's can be dangerous for me. People move so fast. I find it adds anxiety to everything I do."

He finds himself adjusting and adapting all the time. "If you don't feel good physically, you don't feel good emotionally," he said.

Cold weather is "murder" on his body. He and his wife often have considered moving to a warmer climate, but with both their families in Chicago, it makes it difficult. Families, Richter also emphasized, become essential under circumstances such as theirs.

Like Richter, Newman also struggles with accepting that he is a different person.

"People say, `You don't look too different or sound different,' but I've changed radically. I used to love to dance," he said. "Now I watch the people on the dance floor at weddings."

Wife Maria acknowledged that their situation often is challenging. "It takes an exorbitant amount of patience," she said. "Sometimes I don't know where I'm going to pull more patience from."

But what his accident also has done, she said, is put life in perspective.

"It cuts the bull," she said. "There's no room for it. Our whole life changed. We were active, we traveled, now we're homebound. Family has become a lot more important; you see things more clearly--family and friends, those people who really count."

Richter agreed: "I think when an event like this interrupts your life, you inexplicably contemplate your life and your relationships more deeply."

"It's like people when they're dying, they get to see what really matters," Maria Newman said. "We get to see this so much sooner."